Prospective Students
MPhil/PhD PSYCHOANALYTIC STUDIES
Students may pursue PhDs under any aspect of the general rubric. A basic understanding of psychoanalytic concepts or, alternatively, methods of psychoanalytic research or methods of historical analysis will be required. These will be introduced in a series of seminars and workshops. Research may be theoretical (conceptual), empirical, or historical or a combination of these. The PhD does not qualify students for clinical work although a clinical training is highly compatible with pursuing the programme. The programme aims to demonstrate how an academic understanding of psychoanalytic concepts (its theory or metapsychology) and/or the historical background to ideas should always be intertwined with its clinical precepts in line with the course’s principles that theory can only arise from a context clinical and historical.
The programme is interdisciplinary: if their thesis subject indicates it, students may obtain secondary supervision in other departments and students from other departments may similarly participate in our programme and receive secondary or tertiary supervision within the Psychoanalysis Unit.
Psychoanalytic theory can be studied either for its own sake or as applied to other allied fields in the natural and social sciences, arts and humanities. All students will be assigned a primary and secondary supervisor one of whom will be a qualified psychoanalytic clinician.
